Scott Adams, the comic-strip satirist of office culture who later fashioned himself a self-help guru and anti-woke crusader, has died of the aggressive form of prostate cancer that he revealed he had last year.Adams will, likely, largely be remembered for the legacy of Dilbert, the comic strip that at one point was syndicated in 2,000 newpapers, and that cleverly skewered the ironies and frustrations of cubicle-dwelling office culture of the 1980s and 90s. The central character, Dilbert, an engineer, seemed to be a foil for Adams himself, a frustrated cog in a larger corporate wheel — Adams worked for Crocker National Bank and then Pacific Bell in San Francisco, before he ultimately became one of the most successful cartoonists in the country.He said that Dilbert was based on doodles he drew while in meetings at the bank of a particular "potato-shaped" coworker who was "fun to draw.""I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist from the time I was 5, when I first learned that cartoonists existed," Adams wrote in a New York Times essay in 2003. "I wanted to get paid for drawing pictures all day long. But when you reach an age where you understand likelihood and statistics, you lose that innocence that anything is possible. In high school, I realized there was only one Charles Schulz and a lot of lawyers."Adams's knowing nature about the ways of corporate life, and his penchant for critique, led to a book deal with the Wall Street Journal that led to The Dilbert Principle, a bestselling book of 1996 which promoted the "principle" that "the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management."While continuing the comic strip and pumping out multiple other books with titles like Loserthink, and Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success, Adams also was clearly taking a turn toward far-right politics and perhaps even conspiracy theories, holed up in his home in Pleasanton. Adams also took on religion in a couple of books, which The Baffler likened to the work of "an over-confident first-year philosophy student."Back in 2006, on his blog — where controversies about him as a public figure began — Adams picked up a white supremacist talking point in questioning whether the Holocaust death toll of 6 million was a real figure or one "that someone pulled out of his ass." He angered many with another blog post in which he wrote "women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. Its just easier this way for everyone.”In 2015, Adams made headlines for predicting with "98 percent" certainty that Donald Trump would win the presidency, based on  Trump's power of persuasion and ability to distill all conversation down to simple talking points.And in 2019, Adams spurred local ire when he appeared to use the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting as a means to promote a for-profit news-gathering app he had launched.Adams claimed he sacrificed his social life and monetary gain for the cause of supporting Donald Trump. But Adams's final major controversy, which got him fully canceled, and his syndication deals fully erased, came when he mouthed off particularly offensively on a topic he'd railed about for years: race. In a 2023 podcast, his daily Real Coffee With Scott Adams, he went on a racist rant, based on a single poll, in which he deemed all Black Americans as "a hate group," and saying further, "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away."Adams would later try to walk these comments back, but they came after years in which he'd bemoaned that he'd lost jobs because of his race, and in which he had staunchly supported the obviously, virulently racist Donald Trump and his policies.He would subsequently take to the airwaves of his podcast — which apparently had nearly 200,000 subscribers — and discuss how he'd "thrown away" his career and his social life all for the cause of Trump, and say bizarrely unhinged things like "welcome to the highlight of human civilization," and blaming all the trouble in the world on Democrats.Last May, Adams claimed on the podcast to be suffering from the same form of metastesizing prostate cancer as Joe Biden. "I'd like to extend my respect and compassion for the ex-president and his family because they're going through an especially tough time," Adams said at the time. "It's a terrible disease."He also said that he likely only had a few months to live, and in November, he made a plea directly to President Trump, which Trump responded to, at least in tweet form, asking for help getting access to medication for his cancer.As the Chronicle reports, Adams had discussed plans to end his own life through physician-assisted suicide this June, if he made it that long. He was, reportedly, in hospice care.Adams's death was announced by his ex-wife, Shelly Miles, via the podcast. She read from a letter dated January 1, in which Adams wrote, "If you are reading this, things did not go well for me. If I got any benefits from my work, I’m asking that you pay it forward as best as you can. That’s the legacy I want. Be useful and please know I loved you all to the very end." ...read more read less